Ugly Blog

If you want happiness for an hour—take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day—go fishing.
If you want happiness for a month—get married.
If you want happiness for a year—inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime—help someone else.

—Chinese proverb

First, lift your cheeks, as though you were winking with them. Then raise the ends of your lips obliquely while at the same time pulling the corners down. This may stretch your lips to the point where your teeth are visible. Deepen your nasolabial furrow by lifting your upper lip laterally, slightly raising and widening your nostrils while flattening the skin on your chin boss and lower lip, and producing crows feet at your eye corners and slight bags below your lower eyelid. Finally, pull your scalp back, as though you were wiggling your ears. Now you’re happy.

The funny thing is, if you followed my directions, you probably are slightly happier for it. The facial-feedback hypothesis—that “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy,” in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh—has been around since Charles Darwin observed that “Even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it.”

The effect was confirmed by Robert Zajonc and others: the contraction of facial muscles from smiling or frowning changes the facial temperature and the blood flow to the brain, which in turn affects how the brain regulates feelings. You can make yourself happy by saying the letter “e” over and over, or “cheese,” or by sticking your head in the refrigerator. If you want to be unhappy, frown, hold something with just your lips, repeat the letter “o” or the German umlauted ü, or use a hairdryer.

I’m not kidding about the fridge. Studies have shown the direct effects of cooler facial temperatures on emotion by blowing cold and hot air up the noses of test subjects—cool air caused happiness, hot air caused irritation, aggression and violence. Perhaps this explains why international indices have countries like Canada, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, New Zealand, Switzerland and Austria as the happiest, along with mountainous Bhutan, which officially uses Gross National Happiness in place of Gross Domestic Product as its measure of national growth. The only hot countries in the happiest list are Malaysia and Costa Rica. The unhappiest are in Africa and the former Soviet republics—cold or not, nobody ever accused the Russians of being a happy people. Most of Asia is neutral to slightly sad.

But happiness is weirder than that. It’s also contagious, like a virus. Nicholas Christakis of the Harvard Medical School spent twenty years following 4,739 people and their 50,000 relationships with spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbours and co-workers. The resulting study showed how emotions ripple through networks, transmitted by body language. The joy of a friend living within a half mile increased your chance of being happy by 42 percent, but if he lives in a different city the effect is zero. A next door neighbour whom you see frequently is good for 34 percent, but one who lives a block away doesn’t help at all. These waves of subconscious emotional impact ripple through three degrees of separation: “If your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy,” Christakis showed, “that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

Sadness works along the same social mechanism, but more weakly. Averaged out, a happy connection increased the chances of joy by about nine percent. An unhappy one increased melancholia by seven.

There are other correlates to happiness: conservatives tend to be happier than liberals, extremists on both sides are happier than moderates, parents report being happier than non-parents (but they might by lying to themselves), and in religious countries those who are religious are happier than those who are not, though everyone is happier in secular, less religious countries.

Money? It helps for the very poor, but once your basic needs are satisfied—by some measures as low as an income of about $15,000 per year—it does little to help. Education? No correlation. Youth? Negative correlation (older people are happier). Marriage? Complicated, because happy people are more likely to get married in the first place. Sunny weather? Nope. Exercise? Yes, especially, it turns out, martial arts. Nietzsche knew this: “The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!” Friends? Overwhelmingly yes. It’s the number one correlate for happiness after genetics. Being at the centre of a large social network, with lots of friends and friends of friends, is the best recipe for happiness. Unless, of course, your friends are all Russian.

But how do you measure happiness? There are two main camps, and two different happy people in each of us: the experiencing self and the remembering self. Oscar Levant said that “Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember,” and formerly that was all we could measure. So when Nobel-prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman created a day-reconstruction method for measuring feelings during each episode of the day, the findings were surprising. A trip to Bali was far better after the fact than if you called every ten minutes, including traffic jams, frustrating waiters and so on. And children, who were overwhelmingly the greatest source of happiness for the remembering self, suddenly found themselves ranked somewhere between cooking and housework. Perhaps, as George Burns once said, “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”

The study of happiness has taken Kahneman to strange places. To see how peaks, troughs and happy endings affect the remembering happy self, he gave colonoscopies to two groups: a regular colonoscopy group and one for which the procedure lasted 60 seconds longer, during which time the scope was not moved (i.e., the last 60 seconds were without pain). This second group remembered the procedure as far less unpleasant and was more willing to go through it again. Naughty massage parlours around the world know this, though unfortunately there’s no Nobel yet for the happiest ending.

All this happiness research has given birth to a “positive psychology” movement arguing that we’ve focused too much on bringing people from negative five to zero. Positive psychology tries to get people to plus five, despite some evidence that we have a “set point” of happiness—lottery winners don’t end up happier in the long run, for example, and people who lose limbs adapt their level of happiness to their new circumstances after only about eight weeks. The main exceptions seem to be losing a spouse or a job, the impact of which can last for years

Positive psychology focuses on three components: sensory pleasure, engagement with what you’re doing, and finding ways to make life meaningful. True to the Chinese proverb, acts of altruism create the greatest measurable boosts in happiness levels. The mechanism seems to be both the addition of meaning to one’s life and the increase in level of connection to other people. And if there is one fundamental element in happiness, it’s interconnectivity.

“Almost every person feels happier when they’re with other people,” said Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheeks-sent-me-highly, he seems to have the perfect name for happiness research). “It’s paradoxical because many of us think we can hardly wait to get home and be alone with nothing to do, but that’s a worst-case scenario. If you’re alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.”

Really? I’m a writer, a hermetic profession that Hemmingway once called 10% talent and 90% cast-iron butt: “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” Writers, he said, “must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” The same is true for painters, sculptors, musicians—though somehow more for writers and painters than sculptors and musicians. During an interview recently, Damien Hirst told me, “You’re much closer to everyone else in the world with sculpture, and people bump into it, whereas in painting there’s an illusion and a disappearance which is like your own disappearance. There’s a fear and a darkness which is much stranger.”

Like Coleridge’s Raven, who “belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy.”

The laughing man might be stronger than the suffering man—but is he more creative? Or was Gustave Flaubert right when he said “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” Similarly, Aristotle asked, “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?” And Hemingway again: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

The Fins agree. I had a Finnish girlfriend once, a professor of philosophy, who claimed smiling would put her job at risk because everyone would think she was an idiot.

When I left the practice of law to write novels, a lawyer friend warned me: “Artists are the unhappiest people in the world. Why would you want to become one of them?” But is happiness so important? If the Russians weren’t so grumpy, would Dostoevsky, Chekov or Tolstoy have existed? Would Kafka have been who he was if he’d taken the edge off with Zoloft or Prozac? Would van Gogh have seen the way he saw if he weren’t the sort to cut off his ear? Would curing Beethoven of his melancholia have “cured” his music too? What would have happened to America if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t lived in dark depressions? Should Emily Dickinson, Woody Allen, Patti Smith, Nietzsche, Charles Schulz, and Fiona Apple all have taken special ozone enemas to make them happier, to borrow an expression from Ed Diener’s book Rethinking Happiness?

In Against Happiness, Eric Wilson argues that happiness “leads to half-lives, to bland existences,” that “the happy man is a hollow man,” and that “the blues can be a catalyst for a special kind of genius, a genius for exploring dark boundaries between opposites.” It takes a certain level of discontent with the status quo, a touch of the subversive, to shake up art, politics, or literature. An article by Diener in Perspectives on Psychological Science showed that on a scale of one through ten, with ten happiest, nines and tens were far less successful, educated or wealthy than eights. If we’d been happy in the trees, we never would have climbed down and learned to stand upright.

Artists might not have happiness, but they have eudaimonia, the Greek word for happiness that is closer to “human flourishing.” And, when making work, they have flow—a mental state of total frictionless immersion and energized focus in the process of an activity. Athletes call it the zone, hackers call it hackmode, stock brokers call it being in the pipe, karatekas mind like water, rowers swing, eastern religions view it as an overcoming of duality and being one with the universe. Formula One driver Ayrton Senna once explained: “Suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel.”

As the art world’s boom turned it into a social network, its relationship with happiness changed from focusing on flow and dark eternity in the studio to happy smiles at the opening, with perhaps some chemicals to help the transition. Melancholia became unhip. A very good but unsuccessful artist I know was recently given this advice by a very good and successful one: “You have to be more fun.”

It was excellent career advice, genuine in its attempt to be helpful. And it made me grateful to be a writer, thankful that we writers are still allowed to be unhappy. I’ll take a helping of sensory pleasure and a double helping of flow, and leave full happiness to the stupid, social and healthy.

Happiness was first published in C-Arts Magazine, June 2009.